BPM Process Languages

The PowerDesigner BPM supports many of the most popular process languages. Their particularities are described in part two of this manual:

Analysis languages — used by business analysts to describe the system with no technical skills required:
- Analysis: Neutral language, which hides implementation details.
- BPMN 1.0: Standard graphical notation to represent the control flow of a business process. Suitable to refine the analysis of a system with respect to standards.
- Data Flow Diagram: For identifying data exchanges between processes.

Service Orchestration languages — (or execution languages) used by technical analysts to define processes whose atomic tasks invoke services. The process itself can also be a service:
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): Suitable to define the invocation of services by processes. You cannot generate code from this language.
- BPEL4WS 1.1 or WS-BPEL 2.0: Suitable to define the invocation of services by processes. You can generate code from these languages. They focus on the implementation of one partner engaged in the collaboration of a BPM associated with ebXML.
- Sybase WorkSpace Business Process 1.5: Used to implement processes using Business Process Service in Sybase WorkSpace. You can generate code from this language.

Collaborative languages — used by business analyst to document Business-to-Business exchanges (B2B):
- ebXML 1.01 and 1.04: Choreography language, which describes the collaboration agreements between partners that are all considered at the same level (for example two banks). You can generate code from this language.

Objects that are available to you in your model depends on the process language you have selected. For example, if you select the Analysis process language, the data transformation object is not available.

Note:

If you created a model with PowerDesigner 9 and attached a XEM (such as ebXML for example), the model will be automatically linked to the most appropriate process language, otherwise it will be linked by default to the Analysis process language.

Diagram Types

Depending on the language you work with to build your BPM, you will have access to all or part of its available diagrams:

Language\ Diagram	PHD	BPD	PSD
Analysis languages	yes	yes	—
Collaborative languages	yes	yes	—
Service Orchestration languages	yes	yes	yes

Note:

The Data Flow Diagram language lets you create a specific business process diagram which focuses on potential exchange of data between processes (see Working with the Data Flow Diagram).